Biffo and Gannon take a look at the Hyperkin Smartboy - a device that turns your phone into a Game Boy! Also: Biffo performs his latest single...

I've written at length about my love of Star Wars. It's not a blind love - Star Wars isn't perfect, I had big issues with the ending of The Last Jedi, most of the novels and comics I can take or leave, and I think the prequels are just plain weird.  

Yet it's a love that won't ever really fade, because it has been part of me since I was a child; the world building, the hardware, the sheer wealth of imagination. To me, it always felt so tactile and real, a world I could inhabit. With true love, we can forgive so much. 

What I really want is the definitive Star Wars video game that we've never really had... and I'm not convinced, despite it receiving a broadly positive response off the back of its E3 showing, that Jedi Fallen Order is it.

Electronic Arts has, of course, spectacularly mishandled the Star Wars license. Battlefront was pretty good, but what everyone said they wanted was a single-player Star Wars game - one which told a story we could become invested in.

Instead, what we got was Battlefront 2, a multiplayer shooter that felt rushed, was stuffed to the uvula with loot boxes, and had a tacked-on single player mode that felt like an afterthought.

Amid all this, EA closed down the Star Wars game that was being created by Amy Hennig - the former creative director of Naughty Dog - which had very much looked to be the Star Wars game everyone was clamouring for. 

And now we have Fallen Jedi, a "metroidvania" set five years after Revenge of the Sith, but looks very much in the vein of Force Unleashed; a two-game series that had its moments, but was ultimately rather forgettable. 

Biffo and Gannon test out the vintage Nintendo Love Tester - with a little help from Larry Bundy Jr. Who does Biffo love the most? Will it be one of the boys... or his own wife?!? The answer may surprise you!

Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: The Immersive Experience, to give this theatrical event its full, unwieldy, title, is based upon the 1978 album of the almost-same name. Which was based upon HG Wells' 1898 novel about invading Martian tripods, that also gave birth to TV series, movies, and video games.

For those of a certain age, or with parents of a certain age anyway, Wayne's disco-rock-prog opera was an iconic record - from the glorious paintings in the accompanying booklet, to the Martians' musical cry of "Uuuulaaaaaaaa!", to Richard Burton's famous narration.

The album casts a long shadow in more ways than one; Wayne found time to compose the theme to TV-AM, but a full-fledged follow-up didn't happen until 1992. Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of Spartacus might've featured Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Fish from Marillion, but it didn't have the same impact, on account of it ending up like a sentient toilet's idea of what a human musical record might sound like.

Since then, the septuagenarian, mysteriously dark-haired, Wayne has mostly focused on tennis, for some reason, and touring productions of The War of the Worlds. I saw one of these a few years back, starring The X-Factor champion Shane Ward. Despite liking the album, I found that the show struck a queasy balance between rock concert and musical theatre. 

Nonetheless, when I read that Wayne was working with immersive theatre company Dotdotdot on an  interpretation of the The World of the Worlds - that would put the audience inside the action - it sounded like it'd be right up my dingy, Victorian, alley.

I'd been to Dotdotdot's previous immersive show, Somnai, which showed promise, and thus, on Saturday night, I found myself fleeing from Tripods and caught in a much-needed cuddle with a terrified soldier. 

Here's how that happened.

Mr Biffo and Larry Bundy Jr aren't just super gorgeous YouTube presenters; they've also worked on video games! Here they discuss some of them, including Oni and Future Tactics for the PS2 - and even reveal how much they got paid!

While Nintendo didn't hold a live theatrical presentation at E3 like many of the other big-hitters - not including Sony, who skipped the show altogether, presumably due to social anxiety - it did broadcast its traditional Nintendo Direct, which revealed its plans for the coming year in typically whimsical fashion.

Suffice to say, Nintendo's forthcoming offerings are a stark contrast to everything seen at E3 thus far; more diverse, more colourful, more fun... and generally more surprising. While the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are soon to enter the gurgling death throes of their life cycles, the Switch has no plans to nail itself into a coffin anytime soon.

Here are the main takeaways from Nintendo at E3.

In recent years, E3 has succeeded in blowing away the cobwebs of my jaded cynicism, but this year there's a real sense of ennui. We're at the arse-end of the current generation, and all the major games industry players seems to be holding their breath.

There have been big game announcements, but you've had to cherry-pick them from amid the detritus of DLC, mission packs, remakes, and spin-offs. It feels like we're treading water. 

"Cloud gaming" is being whispered as being the next big thing, but there's such resistance to it among traditional audiences that everyone appears genuinely fearful of what might come next. 

Gaming, it seems, is having its own Trump/Brexit moment; the future has suddenly become very unpredictable. 

Here are some more of the biggest stories to come out from E3 so far. 

UbiSoft's E3 presentation kicked off in earnest with a symphonic performance of the Assassin's Creed Odyssey score, previewing an upcoming musical tour. I mean, it was very nice and all that, but not really what anybody was there for. 

Along the way there was an embarrassing dance sequence to mark the tenth anniversary of Just Dance - you could feel the rictus grins even on this side of a YouTube stream - and an unexpected appearance by a man from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

​He was there to promote his upcoming Apple Plus TV show, Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet... in which he plays the creative director of a fantasy video game. 

Yes: UbiSoft is getting into film and TV production. Because... why not?

In spite of all these distractions, UbiSoft still managed to show off some games, even if it was a more muted, perfunctory, presentation than it has put on in recent years.

Here are the big boiz you ought to know about.

Biffo and Gannon try out Tiger's handheld LCD Virtua Cop light gun game, and see if it's possible to play pinball by sense of smell alone...

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Something I'll give Bethesda credit for: the people they wheeled out onto their E3 stage were at least somewhat more relaxed than almost everyone at Microsoft's presentation.

There was a lot of being humble; admitting that the criticism they've received in the wake of Fallout 76 was "well-deserved"... there was a lot of thanking the fans, a lot of giving them credit for everything, and a lot of talking about their amazing global communities.

They couldn't exactly ignore the reception suffered by Fallout 76, so all credit to them for acknowledging it, even if they did try to put a positive spin on it. The big news? Human NPCs are coming back to Fallout 76.

Thanks for that, everyone!!!! You're all so amazing, and it's all down to you!!!!!!?!!!!

<WHOOPING, CHEERING, FOAMING AT THE MOUTH, ROCKING BACK AND FORTH>

Here are the other big Bethesda announcements.

It didn't help that, for me, Microsoft's E3 presentation suffered a weird lag, which made everyone who walked out on stage appear drunk. If anything, however, that actually improved matters, and lent a surreal, soporific, dream-like quality to an event that otherwise felt far too familiar with its blend of familiar game genres and PR-speak.

Admittedly, lessons have - to a point - long been learnt from previous years, and the focus was firmly on games. This didn't stop the stifled autocue reading, or Phil Spencer's self-satisfied swagger, or the number of games that were showcased with scarcely any actual gameplay shown. It didn't stop there being an enormous amount of hyperbole about the next Xbox console, and very little in the way of actual detail.

But we'll get to that. 

Here are the main things I took away from Microsoft at E3; from Keanu Reeves to how much Phil Spencer reminds me of a corrupt prison guard.

There have been several eras in gaming history which I regard as transitional.

In short; a generation where the host hardware couldn't quite keep up with the imagination of the games' creators. Don't get me wrong; the early-80s of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 is my era - it's when I fell in love with games. Nonetheless, when I go back to play many of those games now, it's like trying to squash a duvet into a walnut.

I actually find the likes of Pong, and many earlier Atari 2600 games, far more playable than the vast majority of Speccy games - and I say that as somebody whose fondest gaming memories are all of that era. 

When the NES and Master System took off, and the Atari ST and Amiga were released, it was the start of a golden era when games revelled in their 2D-ness, improving all the time across the 16-bit console era. Then CD-ROM happened, and it all went a bit wrong again. Developers experimented with interactive movies, and struggled to understand the best way to make 3D polygons work.

Go back and play something like Night Trap and it's horrible. Worse still, the original Tomb Raider simply doesn't hold up outside of the context of its era. Likewise Nintendo's Starfox.

It's why so many indie games default to that 16-bit golden age, with the flat pixels; the games of that time still hold up today, when so many either side do not.

And that is why it's so brave of Back In 1995 to evoke the spirit of the first PlayStation, a system which - for all its importance in the history of gaming - played host to some incredibly ugly games.  

Biffo attempts to play Ultrawings on the Oculus Quest, but even getting his plane off the ground proves more than he's capable of doing... With guest hysterics from Larry Bundy Jr and Paul Gannon!